The 2009 Angels Project will take place on Tuesday, May 19, at the Sherman Indian Museum in Riverside, CA (about 45 minutes from downtown LA). The Sherman Indian Museum is located on the campus of the Sherman Indian High School, which derived from the Perris Indian School, the first off-reservation Indian Boarding School in the state of California. The museum is dedicated to preserving and exhibiting more than a century of the school’s history, student body history, Indian boarding school history, and the ethnographic history of the staff and students. The museum’s collection contains objects representing tribes from all over the United States, as well as school records, photographs and other memorabilia. In addition to holding significance for current Sherman Indian school students and school alumni, the museum’s collection and archives are an important and unique resource for the greater Native American community and the general public.
During my grad studies in the UCLA/Getty Program, I had the opportunity to work with this museum and its only staff member, Lorene (Lori) Sisquoc. She has a lot of projects in mind, and on Wednesday, my former classmate, Ozge Gencay Ustun, and I will visit the museum and discuss the possible projects with Lori. We will likely do a few things that day, focused on surveying and re-housing objects, archival materials and electronic media from this collection. Ozge and I are helping Paul Messier organize the project this year, so if you have any questions or are interested in volunteering please email me at ecpn.angels@gmail.com
Thanks again, and look for updates as I find out more info…
and if you’re interested, here’s a link to a radio/podcast interview with Lori from 2005, where she discusses the museum and its history: